Globalization Personalized

In the book you asked yourself the question, "How
globalized am I?" Tell us about your search for your ancestry
in your own DNA.

Yes. The premise of the book is that the world is increasingly
connected, but before you connect you are obviously disconnected. So, what
was the state when you were disconnected, when people
lived far apart and did not know each other? That led me to ask the question
how people did get dispersed, which led me to the answer that our ancestors, the human community, lived all in Africa. Now it is
clear from DNA studies that between 200 to 2000 people left Africa and spread
to the rest of the world. So, I wanted to find out how my ancestors -- did
they really come from Africa? So, I sent a swab from inside my cheek to ...

DNA.

DNA, to the National Genographic Project, which actually does analysis
of your DNA on payment of a small fee. I gave them the serial number --
they provide you with serial numbers, so they only knew my serial number, they did not know
who I was. Several weeks later I checked on the web, typed in my serial
number, and it told me that I was Indian, that my DNA marker, "N52,"
was an Indian marker and that my ancestors came from East Africa some forty
to sixty thousand years ago. [From] the Y chromosome traces in my DNA
they could tell me the trajectory they took to come to India.

So, it was just
fascinating that they passed through Middle East, Persia and then landed
in India when it was the coast of India. The fact is that the earliest
Y chromosome in my DNA is marker M168. That is the DNA marker that you have
and every single male human on this planet has. And that I find very uplifting
knowledge, that we all are members of the same family, and that is undeniable
because the DNA tells you that we all have M168, all males have M168, and
the females have the same mitochondrial DNA that links you to one African
mother.

So, in exploring the world, in reaching out as a preacher, an adventurer,
a warrior, a trader, what human impulses are at work here? There is a sense,
when you read the book, that these ideal types reflect something in
the human spirit which gets further into this question of who we are beyond
where we came from. Talk a little about that. What distinguishes each of these
different categories? Or are they more alike than we realize?

It's a very interesting question. First of all, the desire of the humans
to live in security and comfort and lead a better life than
one has, improve one's living standard, that is a desire which is leading
traders to leave home and go somewhere, to indulge in what Adam Smith calls "track
and trade." There's a human impulse to track and trade. And track and
trade for what? To actually make profit. So, one of the earliest examples
I found in a Mesopotamian clay tablet written by a wife of a trader to her
husband who lives 800 miles away in Cannis. She writes to him that "Ever
since you left our neighbor who is a trader has doubled the size of his house,
so when can you do ours?"

And that doesn't sound familiar at all!

Yes, exactly. And this was 4000 years ago. And then you have a letter
by a Jewish trader from Cairo who lived in India in the tenth century,
and his correspondence has now been found in a synagogue in Cairo. The synagogues there have a practice of not destroying any piece of paper if
the word "God" is on it, and since all the letters were written "by
the grace of God we have made this transaction," "by the grace of
God we have made this journey," all this commercial
correspondence actually was protected. So, in one of the letters written by
someone called Abraham Izu, he says that "I have now made enough
money, I'm returning from India," (writing to his brother) "that we can now live
happily with the money I have made in India." This was in
the tenth century. So, it is the same desire that traders go out.

Look at preachers.
The desire to bring fellow human beings to your faith -- you have found God,
you have found prophet, and you want everybody to embrace that God. That
desire led Christian missionaries to set out and go far distances. Buddha,
of course, was the world's first evangelist, if I may use that term,
"evangelist for Buddha." But Buddha, after he attained Bodhi, he told
his disciples, "Now go out and preach the faith, preach the doctrine,
the dharma, that it is the way to lead your life, and you can actually
attain Nirvana so that you no longer suffer from pain and death." This desire to preach is again very innate in human beings.
That is what leads people like Peter Benenson, the founder
of Amnesty International. He set up this organization in 1961 because human
beings cannot be abused, they have rights, and this is a truth he wanted everybody
to embrace. This is one motivation. He even said
this motivation is to lead an enriching, fulfilling life by helping
others. When I mentioned this fact to the Human Rights Watch executive director
in New York, Ken Roth, he kind of demurred. He doesn't want to be called a
preacher, but he admitted that people who do this kind of job, they do make
a sacrifice, because they have a goal in life, a mission to help, and so they
are making a personal sacrifice to go long distances to find out
about human rights abuses and bring world focus on that.

It's a recognition of a universalism that should be a gift
to everyone, a right.

Exactly.

Adventurers, same thing. The desire to find out what is
behind the next mountain. What is there if I cross the river? This curiosity
to find is also to enrich life. And to enrich one's life one takes
enormous risk. And now to enrich one's life, you have people
carrying a backpack and a Lonely Planet guide, going out to different parts
of the world. So, the same desire is there.

The desire to have a universal
empire, universal control [over] human beings, territory, resources so that there
could be one guiding principle -- Alexander the Great wanted to create
a universal empire, and what I think the United States wants is an empire
of democracy. They want to have everybody to be democratic, you know? And
then behind that there is desire to control resources, territories which are
critical for national interests. So, these wishes are, again, universal and
very long lasting.

In what sense do you believe that seeing this continuity in history, so
that the Buddha and his disciples somehow morph into the present-day reality
of environmental activists -- what is the benefit of seeing that? There
definitely seems to be such a thing that one has a sense of the continuity
of this human enterprise.

The benefit is to recognize that globalization as we define it is an outcome of these forces working over a long period
of time. There's a secular force which is hard to stop because it is not one,
two, three people, it's a whole mass of people, their desire, their fear,
their ambition. This is all coming together to produce this force so that
it is something that is impossible to stop forever. It can be slowed down,
it can be even blocked for a period, but the force behind it is so inexorable
because there are so many people involved here that it is an impossible notion
that you can actually stop it.